We had wonderful SQLAuthority News – Community Tech Days – December 11, 2010 event yesterday. After the event, we had meeting among Jacob Sebastian, Vinod Kumar, Rushabh Mehta and myself. We all were sharing our experience about performance tuning consultations. During the conversation, Jacob has shared wonderful story of his recent observation.
The story is very small but the moral of the story is very important. The story is about a client, who had continuously performance issues. Client used Activity Monitor (Read More: SQL SERVER – 2008 – Location of Activity Monitor – Where is SQL Serve Activity Monitor Located) to check the performance issues. The pattern of the performance issues was very much common all the time. Every time, after a while the computer stopped responding. After doing in-depth performance analysis, Jacob realized that client once opened activity monitor never closed it. The same activity monitor itself is very expensive process. The tool, which helped to debug the performance issues, also helped (negatively) to bring down the server. After closing the activity monitor which was open for long time, the server did not have performance issues.
Moral of the story: Activity Monitor is great tool but use it with care and close it when not needed.
Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)
Filed under: Best Practices, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology